


For tonight, it's enough

by TerresDeBrume



Series: Digimon OTP Week 2017 [2]
Category: Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure Zero Two | Digimon Adventure 02, Digimon Adventure tri.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Digimon OTP Week 2017, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 02:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11818872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: They've been meeting in secret for fifteen years. The night Taichi discovers there's a way to end that turns out a lot less happy than he'd have imagined.





	For tonight, it's enough

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this until two AM on a week night, and I'm gonna do it again. RIP me, but in the best way <3

 

 

Entering the Belows has always been, and, Taichi’s pretty sure, will always be the worst part of visiting Yama. Dodging the Pluckers is hard on the heart and nerves, but he’s had almost fifteen years to get used to that part. He’s perfected the art of sneaking out of the house without notice, and moving from shadow to shadow fast enough that even a full bloom night like tonight doesn’t seem like that much of a challenge anymore.

Getting to the actual Belows, on the other hand, sucks. The first time he went there, he was running away from Pluckers, stolen sweets rattling under his shirt as he crawled past the protective barrier and dove into the collective shit of the Flower’s inhabitants. There’s no other way into the realm: you have to take a deep breath, pinch you nose closed, and let yourself sink into a city’s worth of detritus until you reach the bottom and the filtering spell spits you back on the other side, clean and smell-free but ready to puke your guts out.

Tonight is as unpleasant as ever, and experience is the only thing preventing Taichi from bending over and emptying his stomach in the _Esholeu_ as soon as he lands. Well, that, and Yama’s hand on his shoulder, steadying him into an upright position with little circles of his thumb over Taichi’s collarbone. Taichi closes his eyes and leans into the touch with a sigh, throwing his arms around Yama’s waist and letting tension leave his body with every new breath he takes.

  


Yama smells like plants and wet earth. It took Taichi several months before he learned to recognize the smells, used as he was to the dry dirt and gas fumes of the Flower, people and houses fighting the vertical, almost soil-free fields they depend on for scrapes of space that won’t ever be enough. The Belows are always wet, though, the air heavy enough in Taichi’s lungs that the crack in the ground he uses as a way back to the Flower never seemed quite as oppressive as it should have. He probably owes his life to that lack of fear, but it’s not a topic he’s very keen on exploring.

  


“You’re early,” Yama says.

  


He’s frowning, a glare pinching at the edge of his blue eyes, strands of yellow hair escaping from the half-ponytail he keeps it in, but there’s a twitch at the corner of his lips that betrays the anger.

  


“I was too eager to wait.”

  


Yama rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t protest, opting to lean down for a kiss instead.

He’s been taller than Taichi since they hit their last growth spurt around sixteen, thinner and narrower than him forever, thanks in part to a mostly meat-free diet. It’s hard to maintain cattle underground, after all, and while Yama has a knack to get animals on his side, it doesn’t make his surrounding any more amenable to them.

  


“I was careful,” Taichi promises when they separate. “I’d know if they’d spotted me.”

“Ae doyoi uràai uy portàkàkam.”

“I don’t want me hurt either,” Taichi replies with a smile, leaning just far enough away from Yama to meet his gaze, “I swear I’m being careful, but it’s been three weeks!”

  


Three weeks of merchants from the other side of the Flower milling and bustling in his father’s shop, haggling over the smallest bronze seeds as if they couldn’t have spent half their weight in copper and still live comfortably for the rest of their days. Three weeks of running errands for people Taichi wishes he could have punched in the face and kicked out of his family’s home instead of being at their beck and call for the duration of their stay.

The Podmasters may insist on calling money ‘seeds’ but the truth is you can’t eat gold any more than you can eat bronze, and merchants shouldn’t be able to finagle for the price of something even they can’t live without. They do, though, and that means Taichi needs to stay home from time to time, just to make sure no one takes too much liberty with his parents’ hard work.

  


“Three weeks is definitely too long,” Yama agrees, but when Taichi moves in for another hug the back slung at his hip squirms and yelps with startling force.

“What’s in there?”

“A surprise!” Yama replies with a grin he visibly struggles to keep under control, gaze dropping to his bag as he pushes several pieces of linen cloth out of the way, “one of two, actually, but for now...meet Garu!”

  


Taichi would love to say he remains appropriately stoic, retaining the poise and control befitting of a nearly-twenty-seven-years-old-adult. He would really, really love to. The truth, however, is that the second Yamato gets the puppy out of the bag, Taichi is cooing like there’s no tomorrow and grabbing at the air until Yama plops the little fur ball in his hands.

It’s bigger than regular pups, almost the size of a full grown dog of the smaller breeds, with coarser and thicker fur. There’s no mistaking the oversized paws though, the eager eyes and the clumsy attempts at a waddle as soon as Taichi settles it in the crook of his arm. He coos at the not-so-little thing for a long moment, entranced by the blue stripes in the white fur and the gleaming but somehow adorable teeth that snap in his direction as soon as he gets too close to the puppy’s neck.

  


“I’m sure I look ridiculous,” Taichi says when he realizes Yama hasn’t said anything in the past few minutes, “but this thing is adorable! Where did you find it?”

  


There’s no way to be sure, but if it does like other dogs Taichi’s seen and doubles or triples its size, there’s no way its breed was meant to evolve in the tunnels of the Belows.

  


“That’s the second surprise, actually. You’ll have to trust me to get to it, though.”

  


At first, Taichi blinks, but it doesn’t take him long to frown. Of course he trusts Yama. He would never haver handed him his heart if he didn’t. Well, yes, he probably would have come clean about his feelings, if only out of principle, but he would have given the manner of it some thought beforehand, not just kissed him out of the blue, thank you very much.

Yama seems to be waiting for an answer, though, so Taichi nods and follows Yamato further inside the tunnels, until they reach the point where the _Esholeu_ splits into the _Iàkon_ and the _Nopon—_ the Protector and the Criminal—and, for the first time in fifteen years, they follow the _Nopon_.

  


The river, Yama explained once they’d both learned enough of the other’s language to understand more complex sentences and thoughts, has been forbidden so long even the _Killa_ forgot what’s on the other end, and living in the Belows requires too much time and efforts to allow for exploration of paths that have already been marked as undesirable—better plow on under the Flower and make more space where safety can be hoped for.

Taichi’s been curious about the _Nopon_ from the beginning, of course, mostly on the ground that, having braved, survived, and even befriended the terrifying Creatures of the Belows (by which he means: all but charmed Yama’s people in spoiling him with the most uncanny specimen of fruits and vegetables they can find each time he visits them) there’s not much else that can hurt him but, well. The Belows are at least as vast as the Flower, and _that’s_ big enough to host almost ten thousand souls, animals not included. Taichi never strayed from Yama’s birth level—there are others, lower down—but he still hasn’t been able to exhaust its surprises after fifteen years. It’s not like his life was lacking in adventures or discoveries up until now.

He’d be lying if he said the very choice of path didn’t make his heart race, though.

  


“I heard a sound coming from here about two weeks ago,” Yama explains as they follow a leveled but rough path similar to what they find on the banks of the Ikon, “and when I found Garu I wanted to see where he’d come from. I promise you I wasn’t disappointed.”

  


Taichi nods and follows him. Under the thin soles of his boots, the ground grows rougher, more uneven, chunks of the path gone to the Nopon and too many years of disuse. The light of sun stones from the entry point is almost entirely gone now, but Yamato doesn’t make any move to pull his out. Taichi is about to request it when there’s a gush of air against his face, and he can’t help a gasp of surprise.

It wasn’t violent, let alone painful...but it’s stronger than the kiss of warmth following a particularly fast carriage, stronger even than the fans Taichi and his family keep flapping about their faces in the summer. There’s a fresh smell on the air, too, something like plants, underlined by a sharp coolness he’s never felt before, and Taichi gropes until he finds Yamato’s hand and squeezes his fingers tight.

  


Garu is most definitely not a creature of the underground.

  


It just didn’t occur to Taichi to wonder where this ‘not underground’ place the creature came from could be.

  


“Be careful,” Yama warns when Taichi slows down, trying to understand what he’s seeing, “I almost fell the first time.”

  


Taichi blinks when a tug on his hand and a thin cloud of cold water bring him back to the present, and gapes when he realizes that, only a few meters ahead, the Nopon vanishes.

There’s almost no sound to it, just the rush of water hitting stone one last time, followed by utter silence, like the ground below is too far for the impact of water on stone to be heard from their spot. The river comes to this point, gives one last little wave in farewell, and drops down, down, down, so fast and so far Taichi is almost afraid to lean out.

  


“Keep your eyes on me and one hand on the wall,” Yama says, smiling as he takes Garu from Taichi’s hands and sets him back into the bag, “it’s very narrow for a while.”

  


Taichi, his heart firmly lodged somewhere in his throat, nods and grabs the back of Yama’s green shirt before he can do something ridiculous like sob. He’s careful not to look at anything but Yama’s neck as they walk, focusing his thoughts on the way his muscles shift under the fabric just so he won’t think about the larger-than-life gap below his feet, or the little hands of air trying to pull him off the path and into the abyss. They take ten steps, then twenty, and then they reach something large and smooth enough to have been a road, once.

Taichi clings to Yama’s tunic until they get in the middle of it, and then he crumbles to the ground.

  


“Are you alright,” Yama asks, barely audible over Taichi’s clacking teeth, “do you need to retch?”

  


Taichi, used to swallowing nausea down by now, shakes his head and swallows around the thickness in his throat, hoping against hope to get his heart and stomach back away from the vicinity of his wisdom teeth. His knees trembles. His back, neck, armpits and palm cover with cold sweat. Yama rubs at his neck and murmurs words of reassurance in both their tongues, forehead brushing Taichi’s temple in a show of sympathy.

Eventually, Taichi starts breathing again.

  


“Better?”

“Yes,” Taichi manages, strangled and thin against the air, but sincere, “but I don’t think I’ll be up for that again any time soon.”

“That’s fair. If you’re feeling better, you should look up, though.”

  


Taichi obeys, expecting to find a larger, higher version of the milky and dust-stained dome he’s lived under all his life. Maybe a cleaner one, too, to account for the brighter light—even during Full Blooms, the Flower never gets that kind of brightness at night.

When he actually processes what he sees, though, the air is all but stolen from his lungs.

  


Overhead, something as vast as the Earth looks down at him, blue background speckled with an infinity of bright spots like diamond dust spread on a dark fabric. They shine down, clustering in thicker clouds of silver, swirls of white mingling with the last drops of something purple that’s so far away, Taichi feels like he’s looking at the end of the world.

There’s a wall at his back, yes, and a road that leads up it—back to the Stem, probably—but anywhere else he looks the world stands: no barrier, no walls of brick with pompous names, no Pluckers ready to catch and shoot him if he even looks like he’s thinking about getting too near. No threat of vanishing for being out at night, no looming notions of torture should he slip and reveal he even knows the way to the Flower’s sewers.

His heart beats too fast and his blood rushes too loud, the foundations of his life howling as they crash to the ground and pummel at his lungs, his ribs, his eyes.

  


He’s crying before he manages to find proper words for what he feels.

  


Yama’s hand finds his, soft and unobtrusive, like they’re standing in one of the sacred places if his people instead of...instead of—Taichi’s throat tears into a sob, and he has to close his eyes. Bury his face in his hands and shy away from the vastness around him, a thousand lifetimes of lies rushing at him like a flood.

There’s nothing Outside but the Wilds. The Wilds will kill you. They will take you, they will grind you, they will poison you until you feel each and every part of you die before your brain can shut it down. The Wilds turn life into monstrous shapes, too many limbs or too little, too little lungs, too little strength, too little of anything to make a viable child.

The Wilds are forbidden, because the Wilds are Death.

  


Well, Taichi’s in the Wilds now, with a Riverling, no less, and he’s never seen anything half that beautiful.

  


“Sorry,” he manages after a long while, “I just—I never thought—”

“Me neither,” Yama says, voice barely above a murmur, “I wasn’t any better when I got here, trust me.”

  


Yama brings their foreheads together, and Taichi leans in until their noses touch, sighing in relief when Yama rubs them together. It’s an old gesture between them, soft and worn like comfortable clothes, the intimacy of it more familiar with every year that passes.

It does more to settle Taichi’s heart than anything else in the world.

  


“Better?” Yama asks for the second time.

“Mostly,” Taichi confirms, unsure how much better he’s feeling exactly, “do you have many more surprises for tonight?”

“One more. We’ll have to run if we want to catch it, though, and you won’t like it.”

  


Taichi leans back away from his partner, eyes snapping up to meet the frown on Yama’s brow as he tries to decipher what could possibly be left to shock him. There is a world. There is a world outside the Flower, and they can live in it! It’s too much—too intense, too vast—to process in one night but...there is a _world_. There is _an entire world_ around, and they can go! They don’t have to be afraid of it—or at least, no more than the _kil_ are!

What could possibly make this anything other than good news?

  


“Trust me,” Yama insists when Taichi says as much, his tone far more somber than the situation should allow, “you need to see this.”

  


So they rise.

Taichi follows Yama farther down the abandoned road and onto a bridge over the abyssal depth below them. He ignores the sharp jab of pain that blooms in his ribs halfway through, pushes harder against his legs when they threaten to give up, and lets Yama use a hand to pull him forward, his other arm supporting Gabu’s bag so the poor pup won’t get too jostled by the move.

They reach the end of the bridge eventually, seconds before Taichi’s lungs can actually catch fire and burn him from the inside out, and Taichi actually falls in exhaustion this time, dust-filled lungs unprepared for that kind of effort. No one in the Flower ever runs that much. It’s just a way to die faster.

  


“Turn around,” Yama tells him, tugging at his shoulder until Taichi gives a begrudging twitch in the right direction, “come on, turn around! It’s about to start!”

  


With supreme effort, Taichi finally manages to twist around and face in the right direction. At first, grass fills his vision, but a rapid squint brings the bridge—and the impossibly deep gap behind that—into focus. Beyond the bridge, a stone pillar wide enough to support the entire Flower and then some, the road he and Yama walked on snaking up the rock from the shadows, and going on until it meets the Stem.

From the inside, it’s nothing more than a smooth wall of green stone, poxed with countless arrow and bullets where people tried to climb it over the years. Taichi lost friends to that wall, some too brave and some too desperate to stay away. He’s watched neighbors and passing visitors turn their heads away so they could pretend it wasn’t really there, because no one likes to be reminded how close to their home the Wilds are. If the Stem failed, they’d be the first to die, or so they thought.

From the outside, the Stem is still green, but messy and soft with vines, flying shapes too wide to be birds floating around it like they belong there, like there’s nothing in the world to disturb them. Inside, you can get Plucked for looking at the Stem too closely. Outside, it almost makes you want to go in there for a nap.

  


Then, all at once, the winged creatures flee.

  


“Stay down,” Yama warns.

  


Some of the creatures are bright and colorful, some are dark and sleek as stone. One of them looks like it’s made of fire. There’s a thousand shapes, a thousand colors, more cries than Taichi can hear all in the span of a second as the creatures rush over their heads, close enough to touch, and plunge into the Wilds with the intense urgency of the truly terrified.

  


On the other side of the gap, the top of the Stem glows blue—a bright, sapphire color so intense it burns at Taichi’s eyes and makes him want to look away, the milky white petals of the Flower’s dome shining brighter and brighter, until even the largest of the silver circles in the sky seems dimmed by it.

One by one, the petals unfurl without a sound. Each gap frees a new volute of smoke, easy to track in the light of the dome, thick curves hovering in the air for a moment before it falls back down like pollen. Taichi watches the cloud fall and fall and fall, heart back in his throat and stomach thick with a dread he doesn’t want to name, doesn’t want to face.

He’s debating whether to turn around when something moves on the Stem. A winged shape—not a bird, or anything Taichi could name—propels itself from it, wings beating too wild in the air, like it already knows it’s lost.

  


The way it drops like a stone before it’s halfway thought the gap sends fire and blood in Taichi’s heart.

  


It beats and boils under his skin, flushes his cheeks and stings at his eyes as his hands clench into fists. His vision clouds, ears filling with a roar so strong he has to let it out—scream into the void of the night until it feels like his throat is about to rip out of him and take his soul along for the ride, until he’s bent in half and almost sick it.

Ten thousand people—ten thousands of lives, of families, of frightened people and mourning friends, ten thousands of lifetimes wasted away, millions of lives lost to black lungs and respiratory failures! And all this time, all the while, during all those funerals, everyone kept saying ‘it could have been worse’, kept thinking how much better they had it than in the Wilds, how much more toxic the air out there must be, and all that for what?

  


“They’re keeping it in! All that filth, all that sludge, they’re keeping it—and no one knows! Everyone thinks we’re protecting ourselves from the Wilds but we’re just keeping this in!”

“Taichi,” Yama tries, but Taichi is too furious to stop now, and he repeats:

“They’re keeping it in! You don’t know—you have clean air Below! you’ve got clean air and clean water while we stay in that damned Flower’s poisoned air, all that because they wouldn’t let any of us explore! They clung to their fear and—”

“Taichi!”

“What?”

  


Yama doesn’t speak right away. He gives Taichi time to calm down first, breathing and pulse slowing down to something a little closer to the ordinary before he says in a soft, sad tone:

  


“It’s midnight.”

  


Midnight. The second round.

There are Pluckers in the streets right now.

They have to have seen.

They have to have spoken.

The Podmasters can’t possibly not know.

  


Taichi falls to his knees, so dumbstruck he barely even notices Yama’s hand coming to rest on his shoulder.

  


“I’ve always wondered why we even had filtering spells in the first place. They’ve been there for as long as any of my people can remember.”

“It was to keep you safe,” Taichi realizes, throat too weak and too raw to manage more than a toneless drone, “to keep _our_ poison out.”

  


Slowly, with infinite care, Yama gathers Taichi in his arms and holds him there, the tight embrace a slim lifeline against the revelations of tonight.

  


There is a world outside.

There is a world outside, that they’ don’t have to fear.

There is a world outside they don’t have to fear, and they’re poisoning it.

  


Maybe not all of it. Maybe not all at once. But they are.

  


Worse, still, Taichi’s people are being poisoned themselves. Knowingly. Purposefully.

  


He was so shocked, after meeting Yama, to learn he and his brother had never lost a family member. So shocked to realize there was a place so very close to him, where children grew to know their great-grandparents and knew they’d live until their eighth decade, maybe even longer!

He wasn’t even twelve, when the two of them met, but by then Taichi already had half a dozen names on the list of people he lost. Koushiro. Iori. Two older brothers, and one younger sister that died so fast Hikari doesn’t even remember her. There were neighbors and friends and passing acquaintances and so many names he already knew, by then, he’d never be able to properly remember them all.

  


And now, he knows they died for nothing. Worse, they died because they were made to.

  


Taichi doesn’t even have the will to hide his tears in Yama’s neck.

  


“I’m sorry,” Yama says in his native tongue, “I’m sorry. I wish it could have been a good surprise.”

  


A surprise, indeed. Seeds, Taichi wishes he could hate Yama just now, even for an hour, even for an instant. But then, what could he have said? ‘Sorry, love, but I think your elders are poisoning you’? Ha. Taichi would never have believed him—not until they fought and Taichi’d been dragged here and saw this for himself.

Maybe he should have suspected. All those stories about the _Kil_ , those nightmarish legends, they were false, too, after all...but those were people. People can fight, can do terrible things and change and become good people. Memories turn to legends and myths, twisted with every mouth and every fearful set of ears. Legends about the Kil are cruel and false, yes, but they have excuses.

There’s nothing to be said in defense of what Taichi learned tonight, nothing to make it less terrible than it seems.

  


For a long, long time, Taichi stays in Yama’s arms, soaking up their warmth as he tries to sort through the evening, reason and explain things to himself. Eventually, though, there’s nothing to do but face the truth that’s been nagging at his ribs as soon as he understood.

  


“They need to know. The people in the Flower. They need to know about this.”

  


Yama hums in agreement. It vibrates in his chest, against Taichi’s shoulder, firm and sure.

  


Not a trace of surprise about it.

  


“You know what I was going to say the second you saw this,” Taichi realizes, “didn’t you?”

“Yes. I would have done the same in your place.”

  


There’s a pause as they find each other’s hand and hold on tight, only broken when Gabu starts whining too loud and Yama has to get him out of the bag.

  


“I don’t know if you’ll want to talk about it with me, considering I waited so long to tell you but. I have ideas.”

  


Maybe Taichi should be angry. Yama could have said things earlier. Even if Taichi wasn’t going to believe him, even if they would have fought about it, he could have been more direct, he could have avoided the pseudo surprise route. There are many, many things he could have done differently tonight, maybe even better. He told Taichi, though. He knew, from the second he saw this, that sharing the secret would take them on a path that may end in any number of horrible ways, and he still shared.

  


Say what you will about his methods, the thick and thin of it is, there’s never been anyone else in Taichi's life he felt so confident in relying on. Besides, even if he wanted to change that—even if he wanted to break from fifteen years of friendship and almost two years of something they’ve both tried really hard not to call love, well.

The only access to the Wilds goes through the Belows. He’d be stupid to cut himself off from that based on something he’s already forgiven.

  


“I do want to hear them. I assume they’ll be better than anything I can think of.”

  


Yama snorts and rolls his eyes, but he knows better than to banter just now and, not for the first time, Taichi feels grateful for the years they’ve spent learning each other’s ticks and quirks. It saves time and hard feelings.

  


“Let’s not do that tonight though,” he says, “let’s—”

  


The sound of a thousand pairs of wings cuts Taichi’s sentence short as the creatures from before fly out of the Wilds and back toward the Stem, apparently determined to get back to their nests as soon as they possibly can. They make a mighty racket, screaming and singing in the night air, almost like they’re forestalling the conversation on purpose.

  


Laughter bubbles in his chest before he has time to realize he’s still capable of it.

  


He’s still scared. He’s got no idea how he’ll go about telling his family about Yama and all the things he’s seen tonight let alone anyone else. He’s Outside, though. Outside, and free, and for one he’s not worried about coming back before the third round of Pluckers hit the streets. The revolution can wait another day, can’t it?

  


There’s a world outside. It’s vast, and beautiful, and terrifying, but he and Yama can exist together here—not in stolen moments sneaked out from under the Pluckers’ nose but together, as partners and equals, and equally new to the things they see.

  


For tonight, it’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and review make me want to keep writing ;)


End file.
